Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Joseph Bessler and David Galston presented at our Jesus Seminar on the Road, November 4-5, 2016. Both scholars were generous in allowing me permission to post their powerpoint presentations and accompanying audio.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

For many both in and outside the Church, traditional Christianity has faltered. It no longer addresses the important questions of life. In place of the tradition there have arisen new ways to consider religion, Christianity, and the value of God in human experience. This session seeks to open a conversation on God's human future. Here is the audio that accompanies the powerpoint.

Interest in the historical Jesus returned with the modern period and new debates over the control of modern civil society. As established churches began to lose their status and control, they closed the door on secular reasoning and historical Jesus scholarship. How wise was that decision? Here is the audio that accompanies the powerpoint.

After the earliest period of pluralism, Christianity took the form of Christian orthodoxy. This form is found in the Nicene Creed and still remains the basic expression of Christianity today. Problematically, this form of Christianity is not based on the teaching of Jesus but hte philosophy of Plato. How did Jesus become Plato and God a Platonist? Here is the audio.

Here is the powerpoint from David Galston's Friday night lecture.
The Christian gospels express beliefs about Jesus. They do not reflect what the Jesus of history had to say. But, fortunately, they do preserve traces of what he really did say. In this opening session, David Galston will distinguish biblical theologies about a divine Jesus from the theology of the human Jesus.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

In the Dona Suttra, there is a story about the Buddha that
has an enticing parallel with Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.

In the gospel, Jesus has just finished doing some miracles
and is walking along with his disciples.He asks them

“Who do people say that I am?”

28And they answered
him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the
prophets.’ 29He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him,
‘You are the Messiah.’30And he sternly
ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

31 Then he began to
teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by
the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three
days rise again. 32He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and
began to rebuke him.33But turning and looking at his disciples, he
rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind
not on divine things but on human things.’

34 He called
the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel,* will save it.

This is a central text for the Gospel of Mark.It is central in that it occurs in the middle
of the gospel.The gospel of Mark has 16
chapters.This is in chapter 8.It is that center of the text that we hear
the centrality of the author’s message.This is who Jesus is, what it means to follow him, and thus the meaning,
purpose, and goal of life.

It starts out being about Jesus and ends being about you
and me.Jesus says, cryptically,

35For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel [the good news], will save it.”

That is tough to get your head around.Peter doesn’t get it.The messiah suffers, is crucified, rises
again?That doesn’t make sense.Jesus never affirms who is he is.Peter calls him the ‘messiah’ and in response
Jesus says don’t tell anyone.

Messiah, in Greek christos, or christ, literally means
anointed, that is someone who has been anointed or ordained to do some task,
usually a heroic task.David was
anointed to lead the kingdom of Israel, etc.We all have a longing for a hero or heroine to come and make things
right.Politicians bank on this.“I’ll make America great again, yada
yada.”This is a common longing to
wait for someone to come and fix it.In the time of Jesus, someone to come, defeat the Romans, make Israel
great again, yada yada.

When Peter says that Jesus is the messiah or the christ,
Jesus doesn’t say yes or no.He says
don’t tell anyone. It is as if Jesus is
saying don’t call me a messiah because you don’t know what it means.Then he uses a different phrase “Son of Man”
which maybe is a synonym for messiah or maybe just means what it is literally,
a child of the Adam, in other words, a human being.The
human being, the messiah, will suffer, be rejected, crucified, then after three
days rise again.

Peter says that that’s not a good answer.That doesn’t fit his plot of how things need
to shake out, or as they say now, Peter doesn’t like how that narrative is
taking shape.Jesus pushes back and
says “Get behind me, Satan!”Now we
should bracket later Christian mythology around the term Satan.Satan is not the fallen angel, but the
tempter or tester, the being within God’s court who goes around and tests
people.

Peter, in Jesus’s mind is taking up the role of the satan
by saying, you don’t have to do that hard stuff, crosses and suffering,
no.

Jesus is saying, “Don’t tempt me.Don’t let me lose my focus.”I
think that is what is being said there.

Then Jesus puts it to all of them, his disciples and the
crowd.If you want to follow me, you,
too, must take up the cross.If you
want to save your life, you will lose it.If you lose it for my sake and the gospel, that is for this path, this
path of the cross, you will save it.

This is a cryptic passage.It is hard to get our heads around it, but even harder to actually do.
What does it mean to take up your cross?We know it means something important.What are we really supposed to do?Is it literal?Is it
metaphorical? Half and half?

And what about this business of rising again in three
days?Is this literal?Is it metaphorical?Half and half?Does just the messiah, son of man, Jesus do
that, or those who follow will do it, too?People have been dying on crosses and other means for a long time, they
aren’t rising. Is this some future thing in another 14 billion
years, or after your dead?Do you have
to die on a cross first?Or do we just
believe that Jesus did and then your bases are covered?

I don’t find this stuff particularly easy.

As I say that, my detractors will say, that is because you
are a false teacher.You aren’t saved
and so on.Well, maybe.But I also think that many preachers and
theologians are a bunch of snake oil peddlers, selling superstition.They don’t know anymore than you or
me.

They say you have to believe this or that to get to heaven
or whatever.I think a lot of it is a
bunch of theological gobbledygook.This gobbledygook keeps people feeling bad about themselves because they
have doubts.It serves to keep people
passive and obedient, doubting themselves and their own creativity and
questioning.These religious experts
take one verse here and another there and make a theological system that it my
opinion tortures the text at hand.

It think this text in Mark 8 is a fascinating piece of
literature.It is compelling and it has
a pull but I am not sure what it means intellectually, and more importantly,
what it means for me personally, but I know I can’t let it go, and I know that
it has a hold of me.Haunting words,

“Take up your cross
and follow me…lose your life to save it…”

I am going to let it sit, and dabble in some
Buddhism.Then come back.

The Dona Suttra tells the story of encounter with the
Buddha or the Blessed One.In this
story the Buddha like Jesus is walking along the road.And a brahman, a holy person, is following
him.And he sees in the Buddha’s
footprints “wheels with 1,000 spokes, together with rims and hubs, complete in
all their features.”He says this
cannot be a human being!

Both Buddha and Jesus were probably historical figures who
had layers of legend attached to them.I doubt that the historical Buddha made these footprints. I doubt that the historical Jesus walked on
water.I do think that both figures had
a gravitational pull that attracted people to their message or way of living
that resulted in attaching miracles to them.Whether you believe in supernatural miracles or not is not important, I
don’t think.I think what they taught
and did was important and that was attractive.Thus miracle stories were
attached to them.

Anyway in the story, Dona, the brahman follows the tracks
and finds Buddha sitting tranquilly under a tree.He is chilling, doing his Buddha thing.The text says that Buddha was

Deva, gandhabba, and yakkha, are different kinds of divine
beings, or mortals with super powers.Buddha, says no, he is not any of those
things.He also says no to whether or
not he is a human being.

Dona, the brahman, asks him,“What kind of being are you?”

Buddha says in paraphrase, if I were any of those things,
I would be subject to future arising, for example, reincarnation, but these
ways have been abandoned.One life to
another to human to deva he has cut off.He is not identified with anything.

Then Buddha says:

"Just like a
red, blue, or white lotus — born in the water, grown in the water, rising up
above the water — stands unsmeared by the water, in the same way I — born in
the world, grown in the world, having overcome the world — live unsmeared by
the world. Remember me, brahman, as 'awakened.'

Then he goes on…

"The
fermentations by which I would go

to a deva-state,

or become a
gandhabba in the sky,

or go to a
yakkha-state & human-state:

Those have been destroyed by me,

ruined, their stems removed.

Like a blue lotus,
rising up,

unsmeared by water,

unsmeared am I by
the world,

and so, brahman,

I'm awake."

Another passage tough to get our heads around and perhaps
even harder to live out.Buddha is not
identified with any category.He has transcended all of these identities,
not because he is magic, or divine, but because he is awake.

The invitation from Buddha to us is to become
awakened.

The invitation from Jesus to us is to lose our lives to
find them.

Are these invitations similar or different?Are they complementary or contrasting? Do we
take up a cross?Do we become a
lotus?Or both?Must one be right the other wrong?Does one path inform the other?I leave the questions open.

I do find it helpful to find wisdom wherever it may be found.I think that the religious quest or the
spiritual quest for those who have trouble with the word religion is to take
what we can and then ask, to what is this invitation?

Personally, I want to follow Jesus and I want to be
awake.I am probably neither, but I
still have this day and maybe even more to give it a go.

Religion, in my opinion, and that is all it is, take it
for what it is worth, my opinion, is a beautiful magnificent thing.At its best it invites us

to redefine ourselves,

to challenge all self-definitions,

to engage in an exciting quest,

to live with depth,

to recognize illusions,

to awaken,

to not cling to a version of self that is destructive,

but like a snake to shed the skin and be reborn,

and to contribute to this wild, amazing human existence on
this beautiful planet.

And we have whatever time we have to do it.

I find it personally tedious to worry about what others
think I should do or believe.I deal
with the tedium by making light of it, like a lotus, rise above it.I find it actually abusive to try to
manipulate people into thinking or believing in things in order to get some
reward or avoid punishment.Religion is too important for that.It is too important to be left to the
zealots.

The symbols of religion play with one another, and cross
paths.I think it is fruitful to take a
religious text and compare it with one from another tradition and see what is
produced.

To pick up a cross like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to be awake
like Thich Nhat Hahn, yes, yes.Not
that we have to be those people or think we have to be something great, but to
live the life we have with wakefulness, with not clinging, with experiencing
the suffering in a way that acknowledges it and transcends it, to pick up the cross
and to rise.

Our religious stories are not about things that happened
or things that must be believed, but about ways of happening in the
present.

I think these stories, Mark chapter 8 about Jesus and the
Dona Suttra about Buddha have fascinating parallels and points of
intersection.They contrast as well.Buddha does not want to rise again, Jesus
does.What does rising mean for each of
them?Jesus picks up the cross to
engage suffering.Buddha meditates to
transcend suffering.Yet both are of
the world but not defined by it.Who
are they? They both refuse definition.Lose your life to save it.Be
awake.

As a lovely irony I chose the text where Jesus is about to
be arrested to complete the task he spoke of, to suffer and be crucified.He prays and he tells his disciples to be
awake.They sleep.You can take that story at face value, that
is that Jesus wants the disciples to stay awake with him.

But with the insights from the Buddha story, I play with
the idea that Jesus is inviting the disciples to be awake in the Buddhist
sense.To transcend all identities put
upon us.Why? Why would you do
that?You do that to live freely.So you can be present to what is at hand and
to who is at hand.To be awake, carrying
the cross.Living a life that is
engaged.Like a lotus, unencumbered, so
that one can be with, be present to, feel with, in other words live compassion,
which is likely the highest value for both Jesus and Buddha.

I am going to close with one more story.Here is an illustration of both following the
cross and being awake.This is from
another tradition, the Jewish tradition, from the Talmud as told by Henri
Nouwen in his book Wounded Healer:

A Rabbi asked
Elijah, “When will the Messiah come?”

Elijah replied, “Go
and ask him yourself.”

“Where is he?”

“Sitting at the gates of the city.”

“How shall I know him?”

“He is sitting among the poor covered with wounds. The others unbind all
their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds
one at a time and binds it up again, saying to himself, “Perhaps I shall be
needed; if so I must always be ready so as not to delay for a moment.”

Sunday, January 24, 2016

[Special thanks to
Rev. Fran Hayes.She is the pastor of
Littlefield Presbyterian Church in Dearborn, Michigan.I borrowed a lot of great information from
her for this sermon!]

Today we are dedicating our new hymnal.First a quiz:

Finish the lines of these hymns:

God of the Sparrow, God of [the whale]

Here I am Lord.Is it
I, Lord.[I have heard you calling in
the night]

I’m Gonna Live so[God can use me]

Morning Has Broken[Like the first morning]

You did pretty well.These songs and many others are part of us.They may be “heart songs” -- songs that have
found a place in our hearts.Here is
the deal.All of those hymns plus many
others were unfamiliar to Presbyterian congregations before the 1990
hymnal.Many of the songs that were
new to us in 1990 are now favorites—heart songs.

Why do we need a new
hymnal?What is the matter with the old
one?

Nothing of course. There is nothing wrong with the old
hymnal.It served us for a
generation.There is nothing more wrong
with the 1990 hymnal than there is wrong with the photo album you put together
in 1990 of your family.It is a great
photo album.It is great looking
through the pictures of the family from 25 years ago.

But since 1990, the family looks a little different.The existing members have become a bit more
mature.Some are not there.There may some new family members.Good thing we didn’t stop taking pictures
twenty-five years ago.We have tended to
grow fond of some of these new family members.So we ought to take their picture with our
cell phones and load them on our computerized photo album.That was something we didn’t do in 1990.

My mother has stacks of photo albums of photos she took from the 1950s up until a few years before she
died.She also inherited albums from her mother and
her husband’s mother.When I made a
family history book about 15 years ago, I took many of those old photos and
reproduced them as well as new photos and made a new album.I had to be selective.In
doing so I was creating our family’s story.It is probably time to do that again.

In a similar way, the church’s hymnal of our larger
Presbyterian family gets updated about once per generation.We look different that we did 25 years
ago.We have grown.We have changed.Our photo album, our hymnal reflects that
change.

There is nothing wrong with our old hymnal.There is something right about a living
vibrant tradition that continues to re-create itself. Many of the hymns have
become like our theology, less focused on beliefs and more metaphorical.More hymns reflect our multi-cultural
reality.More inclusive in
language.More hymns focus on social
justice.These have been added over the
years.

Singing has been part of our religious and spiritual
practice since well the beginning of religion and spirituality.One of the oldest texts in the Hebrew
Scriptures is a song.Miriam, the
sister of Moses, sang a victory song after crossing the sea escaping from the
Egyptians.The Psalms are a collection
of songs for worship.

Likewise, music has been part of Christian worship since the
church began.One of my favorite Bible
stories is of Paul and Silas singing hymns in jail.They
have inspired more than one protest movement.

Throughout the medieval period, the Gregorian Chant was the music that shaped
worship.Mostly sung by
choristers.

Martin Luther gave the church an upgrade, in part by
enlivening the music.He took popular
tavern tunes and put theological words to them.When you think of it, you can imagine singing loudly “A Mighty Fortress
Is Our God” while waving your beer stein.

Luther realized that people would learn their theology
through music.He wrote many
congregational songs.While Luther
would allow any text to be sung in worship unless he deemed it unbiblical,
Calvin was a bit more stern.Only
scriptural texts put to music were good for him, such as the Psalms put to
music with no accompaniment.

There are songs from our new hymnal from the Genevan Psalter
of 1551, such as number #330, “Our Help Is In the Name of God.”As Presbyterians moved to Scotland they
formed their psalter, the Scottish Psalter.An example is on page 168 “Within Your Shelter Loving God.”

Presbyterians sang metered songs from the Psalter until the
early to mid 1800s.Some branches still
sing only metered psalms.Other
traditions were a bit more creative.We
have a number of hymns in our hymnbook created by Isaac Watts, the “Father of
English Hymnody.”#32 “I Sing the
Mighty Power of God.”

Presbyterians have since allowed Methodist heresy to make it
in to our hymnals.One of my heart
hymns is by Charles Wesley, “Love Divine:All Loves Excelling” is in our hymnal #366.

The Second Great Awakening led to gospel songs.Fanny Crosby and others made music for
revivals and camp meetings.We sing
some of those such as “Blessed Assurance”,“To God Be the Glory” and “Open My Eyes that I Might See.”

There have been seven hymnals in our stream of the
Presbyterian Church in the United States.The first was in 1831.This was
the church’s first move away from singing only psalms in worship.

The next hymnal came in 1874 when the new school and the old
school reunited.

The next was a hymnal published during the heat of the
fundamentalist-modernist controversy in 1911.

The next was the green hymnal published in 1933.

In 1955 the red hymnal was published following World War Two
and the height of the Cold War about the time Southminster started.

In 1972, Presbyterians came out with the blueish gray
Worshipbook.That was about the time Jim
Peterson arrived.Jim was here for over a generation and the
hymnal we have just finished using was published when he was here in 1990.That
hymnal came out when I was in seminary and was the hymnal that nurtured by own
children.

Since 1911, it has been about every 20 years or so, a
generation, that the church feels the call to revise our “photo album.” There is only so much room.You need to add new pictures.What to do with the old ones?Some are keepers that you never want to
lose.Some were interesting for a time
but they can be replaced.When our
Presbyterian family needs to update its “photo album” of hymns it wrestles with
what hymns are our “heart songs,” that have been with us, what hymns are we as
a new generation singing, and how do we put it together.

The formation of this committee for the new hymnal began in
2004.The new hymnal was published in
September 2013.None of the members of
this committee, not one, is completely happy with it.What that means is that no individual person
agreed with all of the decisions of what hymns to include and what to leave
behind.Each of us would do better for
our own selves in choosing our own favorite hymns!This congregation could not create a hymnal
for itself that everyone would like.But, it isn’t about that.It is
about the breadth of songs that speak to our hearts.It isn’t so important that I always sing my
favorite heart song.It is of more
importance that I am in community with the person next to me who knows and
loves different heart songs.If we each learn each other’s songs our
hearts might be touched even more.

This new hymnal has about 800 hymns.Half of them are new, that is, that have not
been in previous Presbyterian hymnals.About 60% of the 600 hymns in the 1990 hymnal are in this new one.

The order of the hymnal is such that the saga of the
Christian story is seen in its fullness, so as we sing the hymns we sing the
theology of the church.

Some songs will be new.People write hymns every day.Some will be from the global church.These are hymns from different cultures.These will have different rhythms.They will help us recognize that we all are
neighbors.

The first two hymns in our mini-hymn sing are from that 19th
century American gospel tradition, “I Love to Tell the Story” and “Leaning on
the Everlasting Arms.”I sang them growing up Baptist. You may have
known them as well.

“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” has been made popular by
Iris Dement and Alan Jackson.They
bring a little of the American South to the Pacific Northwest.

For the rest of the worship service we are going to have a
mix of hymn singing and a few poems.I
will make a brief introduction of the hymns as we get to them.Get our your hymnal and let’s sing!

====================

[Part 2]

Here are three new songs for our photo album.

Our theology changes as we change.One of the huge changes that have happened
in the last 25 years is theological language for God.Our metaphors for God reflect the variety of
the human experience.Thomas Troeger’s
hymn, Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud, uses a variety of images for
God.These images shine a different hue
on the traditional metaphor of the Trinity.

Glory to God is the title of the hymnal.This hymn may be the hymnals’ signature
song.These words are the words of the
angels to the shepherds sung to a Peruvian tune.

This third song, Give us Light, Give us Life, Give us Peace,
is a beautiful song from India.

====================

[Part 3]

Inclusivity is a major theme of the new hymnal.So the committee was intentional about
including hymns that celebrated diversity and inclusion

The words to the hymn “For Everyone Born, A Place at the
Table” were written by Shirley Erena Murray.The hymn was ‘evoked’ as she put
it “by the UN Declaration of Human Rights” and her involvement with Amnesty
Internationsl.She said “it should be
sung at a spirited pace.”

The second song, When Hands Reach Out and Fingers Trace” was
written by Presbyterian minister Carolyn Winfrey GilletteThis hymn celebrates
the breadth of human diversity and the variety of gifts and abilities through
which God’s people serve the church and world.

The tune, O WALY WALY is a traditional English melody
associated with the song "O Waly, Waly, gin love be bony.” It is also well known in the Appalachian
region of the United States.

==================

[Part 4]

We take a final peek at our photo album with more new hymns.

“He Came Down” isChristmas song celebrating the incarnation.It is a traditional Cameroon piece.

“As the Wind Song Through the Trees” is another beautiful
song by Shirley Erena Murray.The music
was composed by Lim Swee Hong of
Singapore.He is the author of the book “Giving
Voice to Asian Christians.”

“Heleluyan, We Are
Singing” is a Muscogee hymn.“Heleluyan”
is the Muscogee (Creek) word for “Alleluia.”This Muscogee hymn is a Trail of Tears song, a testimony that their
Christian faith was more powerful than their mistreatment by those who took
away their ancestral homelands. Revered and cherished, it remains the most
popular Muscogee hymn sung in churches in Oklahoma.

The closing hymn, “Siyahamba” is Zulu for “We are Marching”
or “We are Walking.”This hymn from
South Africa has been popular since the 1990s and now in the new Presbyterian
hymnal.

Audio and text of my sermons are now on Southminster's web page. You can also get audio of sermons and podcasts of my radio programs at one place on my Soundcloud site. Podcasts of only my radio shows are on Podomatic. Thank you for listening and reading!